THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION, WHICH IS BASED ON A REAL EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH MY AGENT, HAS BEEN SET IN A 1920’S HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE NOVEL FOR DRAMATIC PURPOSES.

So I pick up the telephone and wouldn’tcha know—it’s my agent. “Too many characters in your manuscript,” she says to me.

So I says to my agent, I says, “Well, golly. What do I do?”

“Kill two of ’em. Kill two of ’em dead.”

Course, I know my agent isn’t suggesting I put a hit out on my characters, but—ha!—wouldn’t it be a laugh if she was. “Suppose we edit out this one dame,” I says to her (I didn’t much like that character anyway), “but instead of killing this other fella, suppose we de-emphasize him. I can cut back his description, and hey, I can un-name him, too. That way, the amount of words devoted to him is more proportional-like, as far as…

Here’s the text of a speech I gave at a History Council of Victoria seminar on History and Fiction, 28 August 2018.

Other speakers were Linda Weste and Ali Alizadeh, and the panel was chaired by Kathleen Neal.

Here’s (roughly) what I said.

What is historical fiction? You may have an idea in your head – a shelf of maritime novels by Patrick O’Brien, or blockbusters glimpsed in airport bookshops – all armour and abs and authors names in gold lettering. In truth, it’s a broad church. The definition of the Historical Novel Society is simply that it is fiction set more than 50 years ago, or beyond the personal experience of the author. It includes incredibly popular genres such as historical crime and romance, sub-genres such as military or adventure tales, cosy mysteries and thrillers, literary or experimental fiction set in the past, entire industries of Regency and…